Hackspace Manchester

Author: Wlll

Wlll

I added a prototype lifter arm to my robot yesterday. It needs re-doing (it’s unreliable and heavy) but it works for now. I’m using a new motor driver circuit for it as I burned out the SN754410 motor driver I was using, the lifter motor seems to peak briefly at about 1.5 amps when starting to […]

I programmed some remote control software using a Golang receiving program on the robot and a ruby control client using my gamepad ruby gem and an xbox1 controller. It worked OK. It was a bit jerky, there’s no PWM so no acceleration, it’s either go or stop; anything not totally rigid on the robot wobbles. Also the […]

I spent all day at hacman Tuesday and Wednesday printing and tweaking robot parts. I put it all together when I got home. This is the front, the lifter arm has holes to allow me to screw in different attachments, I’ve still not designed that part of the robot yet: Here is the back view, you […]

First test of the Raspberry Pi running off battery power with no external supply at all. In the picture the 5000mAh battery is the object at the back with “5000” written on it. My multimeter is measuring the voltage output. One of the Raspberry Pi (the thing with the red light on it) output pins […]

Today I printed out and glued together the first iteration of the ping-pong ball hopper that takes up most of the space of the robot. The assembled hopper: Full of ping-pong balls, I can get 12-14 in without packing them manually. That seems like enough for now, but a larger hopper would be good. Mounted […]

I needed to re-design the motor mounts on the robot base, they didn’t hold the motors securely enough and tended to shift around. The new mounts are better fitting and include a small wedge that fits between one of the gearbox plates where there are no cogs. One of the great things about 3d printing […]

I printed out the front half of my Raspberry Pi camera module mount. It serves two purposes, providing a way of mounting the camera on my robot, and giving me a place to attach the wide-angle lens I’d bought earlier.

Before I pick a battery I need to know what power requirements my robot is going to have so I took it into the hackspace to test. I hooked it up to one of the power supplies then ran all the systems, so Streaming video off the Raspberry Pi over wireless whilst running the motors. I weight […]